Peter Strausfeld, the Movie-Poster Master
There is much to be said for temptation in two dimensions. A menu, stuck against the window of a restaurant or framed on the wall outside, calls out to our salivary glands and draws us over the threshold. The same goes for posters at a cinema: their primary purpose, no doubt, is to lure us into the dark. But there’s a difference. Seldom is a menu an object of beauty, whereas the history of movie posters is strewn with images so luscious, or so startling, that they stand proud in their own right and even risk eclipsing the product that they are meant to hawk. The promise of the apple, dangled before us, can be juicier than the flesh.
Getting hold of that history, these days, can be a costly business. In November, at Heritage Auctions, in Dallas, a poster for the 1938 rerelease of “King Kong” went for $68,750. Some brave bidder spent more than a hundred grand on a “Dracula” from 1947. Talk about blood money. Every art form has its grails, and it seems that the holiest of relics, in this field, would be an original poster for “Metropolis” (1927). At auction, in 2005, one sold for six hundred and ninety thousand dollars. Just to be greedy, MOMA has two of the damn things. Neither is currently on show.
New Yorkers with lighter wallets need not despair. There are a number of troves for the treasure seeker, none more enticing than Posteritati, a store on Centre Street, which has been in operation as a business since 1995. A browse through its recent acquisitions, online, led me swiftly to a bunch of Antonionis from the early nineteen-sixties—“L’Avventura,” “L’Eclisse,” and a sumptuous “La Notte,” with the face of Monica Vitti drawn in black-and-white save for her candy-pink kisser. Or how about a 1973 Japanese poster of “Charade,” featuring a head-scarfed Audrey Hepburn against a backdrop of blazing blue, for four hundred and fifty bucks? A steal. It would be like having a patch of sky on your bedroom wall.
Peter Strausfeld’s “Red Wedding,” 1973.
Whether you are buying, researching, or resigned to simply dreaming, the plethora of choice in the poster market is enough to turn the mildest fan into a drunken Aladdin, stumbling helplessly around the cave. One tip: pick an actor, a director, a period, or a country of origin, tie them together, and follow the thread of your taste. Anyone in need of extra Hepburn, for example (and who isn’t?), is advised to scout beyond the obvious borders. I am lucky enough to possess an American poster for “Funny Face,” from 1957, with not one but two Audreys—her head and shoulders in scarlet, plus her full-length figure, black-clad, and blissfully lost in a dance. If I had the means, however, I would supplement that with a 1964 poster for “Roman Holiday” from what was then Czechoslovakia, with “Audrey Hepburnová,” as she is listed, superimposed on an overhead shot of Rome in a merry modernist patchwork; or else a Polish invitation to the same film, from 1959, which transforms her into a red-skirted sprite from a children’s picture book.
Here’s a joke: for the freest and the most fantastical posters of all, you can’t beat an oppressed state. In postwar Communist Poland, under the auspices of the Ministry of Art and Culture, designers were pretty much let off the leash. Many artistic enterprises, including theatre, opera, and the circus were promoted by their imaginings, but, for sheer nerve, cinema took the crown. Why so? Perhaps because of the culture clash involved. The pure products of America and its capitalist corporations, such as Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century Fox, banged against the lyrical (and notably anti-prudish) wit that was permitted to flourish, somehow, in the Soviet bloc. Official Hollywood posters, especially in the Reagan years, were spurned in favor of surreal homegrown imagery, most of it only obliquely connected to the movies in question.
A case in point would be “Working Girl,” Mike Nichols’s 1988 comedy of office politics. Some American viewers were pulled into it by a boring—and slightly embarrassing—poster of Harrison Ford, smirking in a suit, while a loyal Melanie Griffith clings to his shoulder and Sigourney Weaver, as befits her role of nemesis, gives a wicked smile. No such prosaic and plot-heavy come-ons for the Polish release; instead, an inky image of a man’s head cut diagonally in half, with a serrated edge. Up the resulting staircase walks a tiny female figure in black tights. As a rule, examining Polish posters of this ilk, and trying to guess which films are being publicized, is a deliciously difficult sport. A man trapped in the beak of a giant crow? Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.” A blindfolded head, with a flickering green tongue? “Broadcast News.” A pair of telephone handsets, poking out of robes and exchanging toothy grins? Why, “Terms of Endearment,” of course.
What links the above is that all were begotten by one man—Andrzej Pągowski, born in 1953. (In 1992, he became an art director at Polish Playboy. His first cover showed a paint-splattered bunny silhouette.) For the heartfelt poster nerd, this is where collecting grows most focussed, in the pursuit of works by an individual artist. Swooping away from Eastern and Central Europe, and back to the free world, you could opt for Saul Bass, whose crookedly angled posters for “Vertigo” and “The Man with the Golden Arm” have been widely reproduced—although, be warned, an original will not come cheap. Then, there is Alberto Vargas, who, before he, too, migrated to Playboy, created posters for pre-Code melodramas that enshrine the audacity of the age. How his poster for “The Sin of Nora Moran,” with its uncluttered, near-naked depiction of the heroine, ever appeared on a public wall, in 1933, without getting torn down, I have no idea.
Some deserving names, though, are still obscure, and that is why an exhibition at Poster House, on West Twenty-third Street, running until April 12th, is to be welcomed with gusto. Here, in the first American museum that is dedicated solely to the art of the poster, is your chance to inspect the output of a master. The show bears the title, “Art for Art House: The Posters of Peter Strausfeld,” to which most people will respond, “Peter who?”
Strausfeld was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1910. Nourished on a love of Expressionist art, and having designed work that was critical of Nazism, he left his native land in 1938. Safe in the haven of Britain, he found himself interned, in the early nineteen-forties, as an “enemy alien”—a term applied to almost anyone, including Jewish refugees, who had fled from countries with which Britain was then at war. Strausfeld, like many internees, was taken to the Isle of Man, off the northwest coast of England. The communities that arose there became, to a near-comical degree, temporary cultural strongholds, crammed with artists, musicians, medics, and academics. Among them was Kurt Schwitters, one of the great collagists of the century.
It was on the Isle of Man that Strausfeld met an Austrian film producer and director named George Hoellering—a fruitful encounter, by any standard. Once released, the two men made animated films for the British war effort (so much for being enemies, or aliens), and then, in 1944, Hoellering took charge of the Academy, a cinema on London’s Oxford Street. A movie theatre—or, at any rate, an arena for the viewing of projected images—had existed on the site since 1906, under a variety of names, with an increasing emphasis on European fare throughout the nineteen-thirties. That reputation was fortified during Hoellering’s reign, which lasted until his death, in 1980, and crystallized by an unforgettable series of posters. They were displayed not just outside the cinema but around London, not least in Underground stations, and they confirmed the Academy’s status as a mecca for the adventurous moviegoer. The posters were the work of Strausfeld.
The Poster House show is founded on the private collection of Michael Lellouche, who, in his introduction to the accompanying book, points out an extraordinary symbiosis. “Hoellering never produced a poster without Strausfeld,” Lellouche writes, “and Strausfeld never designed a poster for anyone but Hoellering.” No Renaissance Pope could command such exclusive loyalty. Strausfeld did teach at Brighton College of Art (later part of Brighton Polytechnic), on the south coast of England, for many years, but the fruits of his labors for the Academy are the cause of his meticulous appeal.
Photographic imagery forms no part of a typical Strausfeld poster, even though he often based his designs on production stills. His medium was the linocut print—clean, strong, and scornful of embellishment. Every edge is hard, every shadow is hatched; colors are kept to a minimum, but those which are deployed make a formidable impact. There is none of the delicate feathering of a drypoint etching, and, because linoleum is bereft of knots and rings, there is no grain, such as you might expect in a woodcut. Information is delivered with a shock. Consider the 1973 poster for Claude Chabrol’s “Red Wedding,” which consists of two staring figures and three hues: black, white, and blood. Above the title are the words “Academy Cinema Two, Oxford Street - 437 5129.” Offhand, how many works of art do you know that give a phone number? Imagine Edward Hopper adding a Zip Code to “Nighthawks,” for anyone who couldn’t sleep, wanted a cup of coffee, and didn’t know where to go.
If poster art is a mass medium, here is the punchy exception: images made by one person, for one movie, at one cinema. That’s not unique—starting in 1918, Josef Fenneker designed posters for the Marmorhaus, in Berlin, some of them frighteningly stark—but it’s uncommon, and it means that most people who visit the show at the Poster House will be heading into unknown territory. Print lovers, I suspect, will be more at home than movie buffs; the graphic confidence of Strausfeld, at once forthright and haunting, suggests nothing so much as “Intimacies,” the wonderful sequence of ten woodcuts that was produced by Félix Vallotton in 1897-98. Each of those has a title (“The Lie,” “Five O’Clock,” “Money,” and so forth), and together they fuse into an early graphic novel, taut with frustration and desire. From there to the Strausfeld poster for Chabrol’s “The Butcher,” in which an exhausted couple lean on each other with closed eyes, or for Luis Buñuel’s “Tristana,” which sets the profile of Catherine Deneuve sharply against a flat plane of grass green, is really not much of a leap.
The Academy, in its prime, expanded to three screens, and the programming both mirrored and fostered an impassioned new interest in foreign films. In order to summon up the eagerness of that vanished era, you need only cast your eyes over the names that are writ large on Strausfeld’s posters. Buñuel, Bergman, Éric Rohmer, Satyajit Ray, Miloš Forman, and plenty of Andrzej Wajda and Miklós Jancsó—the Hungarian doyen of the long take. To the seasoned poster-gatherer, what’s remarkable about this list is the fact that it consists of directors. For any publicity department in Hollywood’s heyday, that would have been unthinkable; it was stars, and stars alone, who were guaranteed to inveigle the masses.
Peter Strausfeld’s “Tristana,” 1970.
Take a representative poster from 1938. The space is filled by the face of Bette Davis, then by her name, and only then by the title, “Jezebel.” Way below, in much smaller type, comes the name of the director, William Wyler, who to worshippers of Davis was no more important than her chauffeur. The same is true today, more than critics care to admit. If you’d accosted fans of Tom Cruise as they came out of “Top Gun: Maverick” and asked them who had directed it, how many would have given the correct answer, “Joseph Kosinski”? Eight per cent? Ten?
Now and then, at the Academy, the rule was broken, and the star came first. Hence the Strausfeld poster for “The Lacemaker,” in 1977, which was topped not by the name of the director, Claude Goretta, but by that of Isabelle Huppert. The image is stuck fast in my memory. In England, at that time, I rarely ventured up to London—a city that, then as now, I dreaded and disliked. I had no friends there, and no money to spend; the only things that attracted me were the National Gallery (which was, and remains, free to visit) and movie theatres, the Academy above all. Purely on the strength of Strausfeld’s poster, I made a pilgrimage to see “The Lacemaker.” It was rated AA, which meant that you had to be fourteen or over to watch it. Oh, the thrill!
Still out of bounds to me, alas, were X movies. In Britain, the rating did not automatically give off the same perspiring whiff of seediness that it did in the United States. Many fine films were deemed too extreme for anyone under eighteen, including several that earned a linocut from Strausfeld. Among them were Forman’s “A Blonde in Love,” Marco Bellocchio’s “Fists in the Pocket,” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie”—or, to use its clumsy British rendering, “It’s My Life.” The poster for Godard’s film is a masterpiece, rivalling the clarity of the movie. Anna Karina, the star, gazes off to the left. (A reversal of her actual pose, in the scene from which Strausfeld is working.) Her sleeves, her bob, and her lashes are conveyed in crisp black. Her hairband and her eyeshadow are of baby blue. And her lips, like the wooden partition on which she leans, are as red as Beaujolais.
Yet that is not the end of the affair. The poster is honored with a coda. It shows up on a wall, unremarked, and shorn of its lettering, in a later and sterner Godard film, “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.” Is the director paying more handsome homage to Strausfeld, or to himself? Possibly the latter, given that Godard had already played the game elsewhere, in “Contempt,” where the side of a building is plastered with big, scrappy posters for Howard Hawks’s “Hatari!,” Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Rossellini’s “Vanina Vanini,” and “Questa È la Mia Vita”—otherwise known as “Vivre Sa Vie.” Godard, in short, is gluing himself into the pantheon, and thereby preparing the way for Quentin Tarantino, who cheerfully decorates the interiors in “Pulp Fiction” with posters for the kinds of raunchy, rackety B movies (“Sorority Girl,” “Machine Gun Kelly”) that he reveres. Once you start exploring the topic of movie posters inside movies, it must be said, you don’t just dive down a rabbit hole. You enter a warren.
Whether the movie poster will survive, as a minor but compelling art form, is open to debate. The fewer of us who choose to go out to the cinema, the less call there will be for posters and billboards to guide us there. A Strausfeld is no aid to streaming. Yet the fascination, gilded with nostalgia, is unlikely to fade, because the poster itself is a printed paradox: a static and heraldic portent of pictures that move. That is why you should make the effort to see the Strausfelds at Poster House—“unclassifiable images combining absolute freshness and quiet power,” in the words of Michael Lellouche. Peter Strausfeld, by all accounts a modest soul, died in 1980, and the Academy Cinema closed forever in 1986, leaving Oxford Street to dwindle into the purgatorial strip that it is today. The moviegoing banquet may be over, but the menus linger on. ♦
An earlier version of this article misidentified the actress drawn in black-and-white on Posteritati’s “La Notte” poster.